Wednesday, November 27, 2013

George Mason’s home, Gunston Hall, just down the river from Mount Vernon, is closed on Thanksgiving Day but reopens to visitors the day after. In this season when Americans reflect upon all that we are grateful for, these stately and hallowed grounds are a good place to start.

Commonly referred to as the “forgotten founder,” George Mason IV had a fair amount of contempt for politics. Especially politicians. It was a dirty, grubby affair that attracted mostly dirty, grubby people.

He would certainly recognize today’s crop of sleazy hucksters peddling free lunch, free money and free health care. And when the whole fraudulent scheme collapses of its own weight, the hucksters blame it on the people who warned it would collapse.

Mason later served as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and helped craft that document. But he ultimately refused to sign it because, among other flaws, it lacked a bill of rights. Obviously, not a man who craved fame or political fortune.

He returned to Gunston Hall defeated and disgusted. He took solace by engaging in what he knew to be the highest calling of a man in a democracy: private citizen. He was a farmer, a trader, an investor, a businessman, a father and a husband.

To Mason, that was the well-spring of power in a society. Not government.

“He declared that in a Republic the citizen is himself the State,” wrote a proud descendant decades later.

“He preferred to remain that ‘Lord of Creation,’ the American Citizen, whose dignity and honor are above all Principalities and Powers. The American Citizen is the Republic itself, and the tribunal of his authority is set above the Throne of Kings.”

As Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson would say, George Mason was his own 911.

To Mason, government was never a sure thing. Free people begrudgingly allowed it to exist in a most limited form to serve a severely limited purpose. And if that government got out of line, free people would simply dispatch it and start over again. Or do without.

Looking around Washington today and trying to pick between the all-seeing, all-groping, insatiably power-hungry big government Democrats and the all-seeing, all-groping, insatiably power-hungry big government Republicans, scrapping it all and starting over is not such a bad idea.

Years after George Mason returned to Gunston Hall from Philadelphia and after the Constitution was ratified, his continued calls for a bill of rights finally took hold. Using Mason’s Virginia declarations as a blueprint, James Madison wrote the Bill of Rights.

To this day, this list of rights is the only reason we have not been stripped of our guns. It is the only vestige of protection between us and the government spies. It blazed the trail to crush the intolerable institution of slavery — a result that Mason quite purposely knew and predicted would come from his demand of individual liberties.

As paltry and violated as our state of freedom seems today, it has been worse for various people at various other times during our history. Every time, it was the light cast far forward by George Mason that each time led us home.

And so it will again. Which is why this Thanksgiving, we should all pay our respects to the forgotten founder at Gunston Hall.

Keep these in mind as you contemplate the direction of the American government over the past 50 years and especially since the Obama election.

The Goals of Communism

(as read into the congressional record January 10, 1963, from "The Naked Communist" by Cleon Skousen)

1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.

2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.

3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.

4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.

5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.

6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.

7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.

8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.

9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.

10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.

11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)

12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.

13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.

14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.

15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.

16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.

17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.

18. Gain control of all student newspapers.

19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.

20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.

21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.

22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."

27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."

28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."

29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.

30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."

31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.

32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.

33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.

34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.

36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.

37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.

38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.

39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.

40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.

41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.

42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.

43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.

44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.

45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.